Sep. 18, 2009

How Clean is the Shower?

In an icky finding, researchers report that your showerhead can provide a dark, wet, and warm environment for microbes to grow -- and can spray aerosolized germs when you turn them on. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Norman Pace and colleagues describe a project in which they studied the microbes present in biofilms that formed in showerheads in nine cities around the United States by testing for ribosomal RNA sequences. We'll talk about what they found lurking there.